Animal Killer

Transmission of War Trauma From One Generation to the Next

Vamik D. Volkan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429910814
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

A psychoanalytic process from its beginning to its termination is described to illustrate crucial technical issues in the treatment of individuals with narcissistic personality organization and the countertransference manifestations such patients stimulate in the analyst. The subject of this book exhibited cruelty to confirm and stabilize his grandiosity. His internal world was a "reservoir" of the deposited image of his father figure, an individual most severely traumatized during World War II. The patient was given the task to be a mass-"killer" of animals instead of being a hunted one.This book most clearly illustrates how the transgenerational transmission of trauma takes place and how the impact of war continues in future generations. The book also provides an understanding of a special kind of psychological motivation that directs a person to use weapons for mass killing. In this era of pluralism in psychoanalysis, providing the story of a psychoanalytic case in its duration opens ways for comparison and discussion of technique and can be used as a teaching tool.

CHAPTER ONE

My behind-the-scenes work with Peter

In the 1980s I was the medical director of the University of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Hospital in Charlottesville, Virginia, which had 600 beds for individuals with mental as well as some chronic physical problems such as diabetes or neurological malfunctions, and outpatient facilities for persons with the same conditions. Alongside my administrative duties I also found enough time to practise and teach psychoanalysis at the same location. One day I received a telephone call from a former mentor who had been one of my supervisors when I was studying to become a psychoanalyst. He asked me if I would meet with Dr. Pine, who had very recently become his patient, and help Dr. Pine to restart his own practice as a psychoanalyst. He informed me that Dr. Pine, a psychiatrist, had gone through his training analysis and had been trained as a psychoanalyst at a psychoanalytic institute some distance from Virginia where he had practised his profession until he experienced some disturbing family problems. My former mentor did not give me details of Dr. Pine’s personal problems, but informed me that after his wife left him and soon after they were divorced, Dr. Pine had become depressed and stopped practising psychoanalysis. I was told that he and his ex-wife had no children and he had lived alone for four years while his office remained closed. Then, a year before our conversation, Dr. Pine had moved to Virginia, opened an office, and started practising psychotherapy. Recently he had begun his second personal psychoanalysis with my former mentor and was hoping to return to practising psychoanalysis when he felt comfortable enough to do so.

Unexpectedly, a man seeking psychoanalysis, who turned out to be Peter, came to see Dr. Pine, and since he had been away from the psychoanalytic world for years, Dr. Pine felt that he should consult someone and receive supervision. Not knowing who to call, he had asked his analyst for a name and my former mentor agreed to introduce us. Looking back, I suspect that before calling me my mentor had heard something about the man who had come to see Dr. Pine. He said nothing about him however, and I agreed to meet Dr. Pine. My former mentor (now long dead) and I never spoke about Dr. Pine again, even during professional meetings.

When Dr. Pine came to see me I was expecting a man younger than me, but he was about my age. He was very polite, and he related his history, which my mentor had already told me, without adding much new material. At his new location in Virginia he had opened an office ten months previous to our meeting, advertised as a psychoanalyst in the local telephone book, and had already seen patients for evaluation and short-term treatment. He told me that a man named Peter seeking psychoanalysis had opened the telephone book, seen his advertisement, and made an appointment to see him two days later. This excited Dr. Pine greatly since he wanted to return to the profession for which he was trained. After several meetings with Peter however, he was puzzled about what to do with him and was not even sure if Peter was suitable for analysis. His wish to restart his psychoanalytic practice won the day; he accepted Peter as a patient, arranging to see him four times a week, and now asked me if I would be his consultant. I said “yes.” Dr. Pine ended up coming to my office once a week for five years. Throughout this time I would learn more about Dr. Pine’s life, but never intimate details. He kept a highly professional relationship with me, and we never saw each other outside of my office. He never attended psychoanalytic meetings and, as far as I know, Peter was the only person he analysed—while meeting with me once a week—after moving to Virginia and reopening his practice. My involvement with Peter through five years of Dr. Pine’s work with him taught me a great deal, which I will now begin to share with the reader.

During his first visit to Dr. Pine’s office Peter informed him that he had a history of heavy drinking and had attended some Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in the past. Peter’s job did not require that he stay put in an office from nine to five, and he was constantly on the move meeting politicians, business people, and others involved in the weapons industry. For some time prior to coming to see Dr. Pine, Peter customarily had three- to four-Martini lunches and he could manage this. The weekend before calling Dr. Pine Peter and his wife Patsy were at a dinner party in Richmond, Virginia, attended by several governors from southern states and high-level business leaders. Apparently at the dinner party he had had too many alcoholic drinks and ended up vomiting on one of the governors sitting next to him at the table. Patsy was terribly embarrassed. When they returned home she told her husband to enter into psychoanalysis right away or she would definitely leave him.

Patsy was born in the South, the daughter of a former governor. I do not recall the details of how the couple met. They had three daughters; one had just entered college away from home and the other two, fraternal twins, were still in high school and living at home. Patsy had undergone psychoanalysis and apparently this helped her to continue to live with Peter—no doubt a difficult thing to do, as the reader will see—and raise her daughters. The incident at the dinner party apparently made her feel that she had had enough; she became very upset and demanded that Peter started changing, or else.

After receiving this ultimatum from his wife, Peter looked through the telephone book, saw Dr. Pine’s name, and called for an appointment. When he appeared at the psychoanalyst’s office a few days later he characterised himself as one of the most important people in the United States. Peter had served in the Vietnam War. Since there was no official declaration of this war, the general view is that it started in the mid- or late 1950s. Before this war came to an end in 1975, Peter had become involved in manufacturing and selling military hardware, from contemporary weapons to those still considered government secrets. He told Dr. Pine that the success of the company with which he was associated primarily depended on his most brilliant skills as a lobbyist and manufacturer of weapons. Peter stated that the population of the United States depended on him since his weapons could protect American lives. His weapons, he added, could kill thousands or millions of enemies, and Dr. Pine noted that while talking about them he showed no emotional response to their deadly functions.

Peter seemed to be dependent on Patsy and very anxious about the possibility that she might leave him, but at the same time he declared that he felt a lack of closeness to his family. He told Dr. Pine that he was sexually inhibited and commented, “I don’t really like my children. I am glad that the older one is now away from home. The twins get on my nerves. Their mother takes care of them.” He mentioned how this seemed wrong to him, but he was not about to take steps to alter the situation. He described Patsy as strong-willed, and indicated that he unenthusiastically let her manage the family’s social life. Mother and daughters seemed to have lives of their own. He described how he did not wish to fight with Patsy and when he could not find a good excuse he would accompany her to social events but feel like a robot in such situations.

Peter bragged about the amount of money he was making. Patsy and the children were well taken care of financially. The family had a very nice house in which he had a huge special room where he could be alone. He mentioned that he was a hunter and his hobby was taxidermy. When not working or hunting he said he went to taxidermy shops and talked with other hunters. He implied that such places belonged to another world and while he was there he was a different person. At the taxidermist he could even tell dirty jokes and laugh. Dr. Pine learned that some of Peter’s kills had been stuffed and hung on the walls of his special room.

When Dr. Pine enquired about Peter’s childhood, Peter briefly described how his biological father had left the family when he was six weeks old and how Gregory entered his life when he was three. Although Gregory would not speak about his war experiences, Peter knew he had worked on submarines, was a demolition expert, and had survived the Bataan Death March, losing 65 pounds and undergoing torture that many of his companions had not survived. He had been good to Peter, and Peter considered him his hero. In fact, from childhood on he had called the older man “father”. Gregory was the one who arranged for Peter to go to a military academy and the one who taught him to be a hunter.

According to Dr. Pine, Peter did not to wish to talk much about his childhood and changed the topic quickly to focus on his war experiences in Vietnam as a helicopter pilot. He told Dr. Pine that he had twenty physicians, including three psychiatrists, under his command. Peter did not think much of any of them, especially the three psychiatrists whom he perceived as belonging to the lowest level of the medical profession. He added that he did not really care about Dr. Pine or undertaking psychoanalysis. He was sure that he was much smarter than Dr. Pine and unlike him he was rubbing elbows with very powerful individuals. All he wanted was to come to see the doctor four times a week. This way his wife, believing he was undergoing psychoanalysis, would not leave him.

When fifty minutes were up, Dr. Pine asked Peter to come to talk to him again and together they would decide how to proceed. A few days later Peter appeared on time at Dr. Pine’s office and right away launched into a long discussion of his involvement in a half-billion-dollar project. The day before he had gone to Washington in his fancy chauffeur-driven car and had a Martini lunch with some senators and congressmen. He took pains to let Dr. Pine know that he was at home at seats of power and could scarcely expect the analyst to grasp how exciting his exalted situation was.

Dr. Pine explained to me that he felt like Peter was living in a glorious castle, but he had locked the gates and would not allow Dr. Pine to enter and look around. Nevertheless, Dr. Pine admitted that the idea of someone important coming to his office because he had advertised himself as a psychoanalyst and the possibility of having this person on his couch was very appealing to him, despite the fact that this man severely belittled him throughout his second visit. This visit ended when Peter, as if Dr. Pine had nothing to say on this matter, declared that he would go hunting for a few days and, upon returning home, he would start seeing Dr. Pine four times a week.

Peter appeared at Dr. Pine’s office five days later and reported that he had gone to Alaska, flown over a herd of deer in a helicopter and gunned down the whole herd with a machine gun. He described vividly how the bullets made the animals fall to the ground, some of them exploding. He felt thrilled. Dr. Pine told me that listening to Peter and watching his body movements imitating machine gunning the animals scared him. He wanted so much to have an analytic patient, but now he did not know what to say to Peter and what to do. He sensed that Peter’s mass killing of animals was connected with his feeling humiliated by his wife’s demand that he get psychoanalytic treatment. When he enquired if Peter had hunted down whole herds of deer on other occasions, Peter said that he had. The urge to hunt beyond accepted conventional customs would especially emerge when Peter faced threats of separation, such as Patsy going to visit her family in the deep South, or threats to his omnipotence, such as when the United States Congress refused to give permission—after Peter had expended much effort trying to obtain that permission—for the manufacture of certain weapons. The analyst noted once more how dependent Peter seemed to be on his wife, and how he would search for ways to express his omnipotence, power, and sadism in order to deny this dependency.

When he calmed down and controlled his fear, Dr. Pine was able to hold on to his psychoanalytic identity, which he had not visited for the previous five years, and calmly tried to induce curiosity in Peter about a link between his last hunting trip and his feeling obliged to seek treatment. But Peter cut him short and continued to give details of other hunting trips during which he had slaughtered animals. He was addicted to slaughter, and sought more and more opportunities to carry it out and brag about it afterwards. Then he gave a “lecture” on rituals and the morality of big-game hunting, the codification of which influenced the way he hunted in an unintegrated way, not unlike the coexistence of religious dogma with the manhunt allowed in warfare. When not busy at work, Peter travelled to far-off places such as India to hunt tigers, cobras, and other exotic creatures. In a sense he was carrying on a private war against animals.

Peter told Dr. Pine that during the Vietnam War he had become a national hero because of his daring helicopter attacks on the enemy. Without expressing remorse Peter described how, besides killing dozens and dozens of enemy fighters, he had killed some Vietnamese women and children by machine gunning them from above because Viet Cong guerrillas were among them. Without waiting for the analyst to say something, Peter apparently went on making statements justifying his killing of these women and children in the interest of protecting American lives. He was extremely proud that he had received three Bronze Star Medals. While he survived the war, forty-eight of his helicopter buddies had been killed. Peter expressed his rage against “peaceniks,” calling them “murderers”. Peaceniks, he declared, wanted the Americans to die at the hands of their enemies. Then, looking straight in Dr. Pine’s eyes, he told the analyst about his fancy guns at home. He especially focused on a Soviet-made AK-47 rifle that he had brought from Vietnam and was using for hunting. Dr. Pine shared with me his fear that Peter might also call him a “peacenik” or “murderer” and threaten to shoot him with his AK-47. It was under such conditions that Dr. Pine agreed to start Peter’s treatment and see him four hours a week on four different days.

When Peter came to his first official treatment session Dr. Pine expected him to begin by lying on the psychoanalytic couch, but Peter spurned the couch, eager to demonstrate that he was in control. Dr. Pine sensed that his patient perceived lying on the couch as evidence of dependency and that this was unacceptable, so he agreed to work face-to-face and told his patient that he could lie on the couch when he felt ready to do so.

Peter launched into an account of his frequent visits to Washington and how he was driven from his home in Virginia by his chauffeur or flown by private helicopter. He spoke of the influential officials he was on familiar terms with and with whom he was spending so much time. “I guess I can tell you about this missile,” he said in a patronising tone, named the missile and added, “That isn’t classified information.” He seemed to be reassuring himself that he had adequate defences against a personal fear of some undefined enemy—perhaps the analyst.

Within the first week of treatment, during which Dr. Pine was somewhat bewildered and did not say much, Peter stopped drinking completely and declared that the bulimic practices he had engaged in were no longer a problem. He had cured himself! Any dependency on someone else, the analyst, had been removed. During the next hours he spoke about working on hunting trophies—a rattlesnake and a black bear—and his visits to taxidermists to find natural-looking eyes for the black bear.

When, less than a month since commencing treatment, Peter obtained his company’s settlement on a forty-million-dollar arms deal, he felt most powerful but not elated. Now he wanted to terminate his treatment, saying that he was in any case alright since he had stopped drinking; it was not he who was “on the sauce” now, but a certain congressman, and he claimed that he no longer overate and vomited. He sought to console Dr. Pine, saying, “You are a nice man; I hope you take no offence if I stop.” Yet, it appeared as if he wanted Dr. Pine’s permission to end treatment.

It was at this time that Dr. Pine consulted me. After discussing Peter’s case using the data available at that time, Dr. Pine agreed with me that he should make a statement to the patient when they met the next day: “There are two persons in this room. You are here because, as you told me, your wife insisted that you get psychoanalytic treatment. I am here as a psychoanalyst, as it was advertised in the telephone book. I am not your wife’s agent and if you choose to continue to meet with me in the future too I will not be an agent of your wife. Whenever we are together, even when you declare that you are in my office so that your wife thinks that you are in psychoanalysis, I will remain curious to find out the meanings of your life events, including why you are in this room with me above and beyond your going along with your wife’s wish. I cannot find such meanings unless you join me and be curious too. At this time you may wonder if there are things in your life that you wish to understand better and choose to change. You decide whether or not to continue treatment.”

Peter chose to stay in treatment. As I will describe, he developed what I call a “glass bubble” transference, in which a patient who exhibits exaggerated narcissism fantasises existing in something like a glass bubble, which constitutes a kingdom in which the individual is number one and holds sway over a universe of his or her own (Volkan, 1979; Volkan & Ast, 1994). The glass bubble transference is similar to Arnold Modell’s (1975) “cocoon phase” in the analysis of individuals with narcissistic personality organisation. Marie Rudden (2011) described a patient who defensively withdrew to “a private internal space” or a “cocoon-place” (p. 359) where he entertained grandiose, erotic, and aggressive daydreams. She also reviewed psychoanalytic literature on such hiding places. It is clear that individuals with different psychological make-up drift into these places and often keep them hidden from others (see also: Ogden, 2010).

A person with narcissistic personality organisation does not hide his fantasy, thinking, and behaviour about living alone in a kingdom or empire under a glass bubble. Such individuals watch the outside world through the glass and evaluate dangers against their sense of grandiosity. They devalue those presenting such dangers and, when this is not enough, try to get rid of them symbolically—and very seldom actually. Stone (1989, 2009) surveyed the American and British literature on celebrated murder cases and suggested that one can discern a distinct narcissistic element in them. He does not clearly differentiate issues of narcissism in general from narcissistic personality organisation. Biographical examinations in Stone’s book, as expected, are limited. I carefully watched interviews with Ted Bundy, one of the most flagrant serial killers, and read about his life and activities (Michaud & Aynesworth, 2000), and I agree with Stone that Ted Bundy most likely had a severe malignant personally organisation.

Peter had his own name for his “glass bubble” without being fully aware of its psychological implications. He called it an “island empire” in which he lived alone. He knew a man who did own an island and he envied him deeply. I shared with Dr. Pine that he should expect Peter, during the initial phase of his analysis, to behave in a way that would keep the analyst outside of his imaginary island since, like the three psychiatrists in Vietnam under Peter’s command, he would not rate admission. Dr. Pine would need to wait until the right time to be admitted to this island and allowed to stay there and look around with Peter. I told Dr. Pine that Peter would continue to belittle him, because Peter, under the directions of his personality organisation, had no other choice but to behave as an obnoxious person. I agreed that hearing some of Peter’s stories also made me feel like vomiting. If Dr. Pine could hold on to his psychoanalytic identity, not perceive attacks on him as a personal issue, remain curious about what Peter would do and how he would behave, as well as what he would induce in the analyst’s mind, we could take a very interesting trip together in trying to analyse Peter.

CHAPTER TWO

What makes a person live in an “island empire”?

When I started supervising Peter’s case, Dr. Pine did not have most of the information about Peter’s childhood or Gregory’s relationship with him that I included in the introductory chapter of this book. This information, along with other stories of Peter’s childhood, which I will describe soon, would become available to me during the first nine or ten months of Peter’s treatment. However, Dr. Pine and I, by observing Peter’s symptoms and his behaviour patterns within Dr. Pine’s office and outside in his daily life, came to a conclusion that Peter had a narcissistic personality organisation.

From the standpoint of semantics, the term “narcissism” in Sigmund Freud’s work has different meanings. Willy Baranger (1991) classifies these various meanings into three categories. The ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• ABOUT THIS BOOK
• FOREWORD A second look
• CHAPTER ONE My behind-the-scenes work with Peter
• CHAPTER TWO What makes a person live in an “island empire”?
• CHAPTER THREE Gregory’s birdhouse and Peter’s raccoon experience
• CHAPTER FOUR Black bears and taxidermy
• CHAPTER FIVE “Empty sleep”, therapeutic regression, and “crucial juncture” experiences
• CHAPTER SIX Operation Desert Storm, sinking a psychological submarine, and the inability to shoot a black bear
• CHAPTER SEVEN Mourning and oedipal issues
• CHAPTER EIGHT A “second look”, freeing a bird, and the end of psychoanalytic work
• REFERENCES
• INDEX